Until all the facts are known, the media's news-entertainment industry should leave the story alone. It should stop cheating the public by presenting the story as a serious news story about "cheating" rather than the entertainment story it is.

There's no straight line between a listener learning about the diverse experiences of others and that listener's mind being opened. For some, it slams the door even tighter. Instead of just reducing the teller to a single story, they diminish her even further, into a body subject to harm.

Tonight on PBS I'm joined by acclaimed Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose novel -- including Americanah, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun -- deal with the intersection of race and identity.

If my childhood had been blissful, if my father had been more interested in raising me than in reading the New York Times, and again, if I had been enough of something to hold his attention, then I might have never found my love for travel, for dreaming, and yes, for stories. And that, too, is part of my childhood story just as much as his neglect and disinterest.

Stories make us who we are. In this inspiring talk, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie beautifully conveys the importance of seeking out many stories from different points of view to form our understanding of the world.

Aren't there authors who stay outside the mainstream and are better for it? To satisfy myself, I concocted a version of objective analysis sufficiently rigorous to help a fiction writer relax. Scientists, shut your eyes.

I don't remember when I wasn't interested in storytelling... I think the general idea of writers, especially writers who start young, is that they are learners, and they don't have friends, and books are their friends. I had many friends and I was quite a social child, but I was always drawn to storytelling. Not just reading books but also listening to stories, those of my friends and families.

What decides whether or not I, indeed, am a feminist isn't the choices I make in my own life. It's whether I'm truly committed to empowering every woman to make whatever choices are right for her own life. So for me the question isn't whether Beyoncé passes that test -- it's whether her critics do.

Why teach U.S. students literature from different countries? This is the fundamental question at the heart of this encounter. I remain deeply disheartened by what I often experience in the classroom -- the defensive rage when the dominant culture is attacked.